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WebSphere MQ V7.1 introduced a channel security feature called Channel Authentication Records, or CHLAUTH for short. The feature allows you to set rules to indicate what should happen to inbound connections to your queue manager. By default there are three rules in place and one of them is there to block all remote privileged users - that is those in the mqm group for example. To understand whether you are being blocked by this particular rule see " I'm being blocked by CHLAUTH - how can I work out why? " AMQ8878:... [More]

We know by Storing the active data in a close-by location like "in-memory", we can reduce the number of trips to either databases or file systems or any other over the network resources. This sometimes saves not only the performance hitches, but is also economically viable if one has to pay per request service. The need for enterprise level global caching is catching up fast, with the invasion of "smart" tools into our daily lives and the increase in expectations for "highly available(HA)" large volumes of... [More]

WebSphere MQ allows independent and asynchronous applications to communicate with each other across a large number of platforms. MQ software is not optimized for storing a large number of messages on a local queue for an extended period of time. MQ can process millions of messages in a short amount of time as throughput but when they sit on the queues and have to be reloaded from memory, it slows the processing and you would likely see performance issues. If a large number of messages are left on queue, you may see AMQ7234... [More]

With the new feature in WebSphere MQ V7.1 called Channel Authentication Records (or CHLAUTH for short) there is a lot of talk about privileged users and administrator access. In this post I want to discuss how to create a non-privileged MQ administrator. Before I begin let me define what I mean by each of those terms. Privileged user A privileged user is a user that has authorization to do an operation without being explicitly granted access to do that operation. The users in the mqm group are examples of these privileged users,... [More]

My favorite part of channel status is a field showing the sub status for a channel - SUBSTATE. It is just one little field and yet it can convey so much information about what the channel is doing. It was originally introduced in WebSphere MQ V6 to address the ever present question, "My channel is stuck in BINDING state - what is it doing?", however it is useful for other problems too. Well behaved channels When a queue manager to queue manager channel is running, but not currently moving any messages, the SUBSTATE... [More]

The default for WebSphere MQ is circular logging. If you do not specify otherwise, when you create a queue manager it will have circular logging invoked. Changing the type of logging in the qm.ini after queue manager has been created will not change the way the queue manager handles logging. If you wish to convert from circular to linear or vice versa, you would have to recreate the queue manager specifying the new type of logging at creation time. Linear logging allows you to recreate lost or damaged data by replaying the... [More]

Hey WebSphere Application Server Service Integration Technology users - AKA Service Integration Bus(SIB) users. Have you ever had a problem with your message flow? You may see different types of message flow problems in Service Integration Technology like: Messages not arriving or not being consumed Poison messages Expired messages Messages sent to exception queues Lost messages Messages stuck on queues Failure in any WebSphere Application Server component which can cause a message flow problem Problems due to Message... [More]

I always felt it would be easier from a user perspective to have consistent trace commands to capture different types of problems in a product. Starting with WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) V7.0.0.3 and WMB V8, the new trace features in the area of broker startup offer just that. Earlier, the only way to capture a broker and Execution Group startup trace was with the command "mqsiservice". For example: mqsiservice V81BK -r Trace=debug and mqsiservice V81BK -r executionGroupTraceOverrideLevel=debug where V81BK is the broker name. Also,... [More]

... which is much more desirable than an ever-expanding waistline! Back in October, Maryam Ahmed reminded our viewers " We Still Love Your Feedback ". In December, Luc Leblanc shared our current social media channel implementation with his entry " How Social Are We? " and also mentioned us making the foray into YouTube. Well, I'm pleased to tell you that we've expanded into YouTube and LinkedIn. IBM Support TV logo (click image to enlarge) For YouTube, we've chosen to help create and distribute content as playlist(s) for... [More]

When we start talking about SSL problems on WebSphere MQ (WMQ), it can be an intimidating topic. Many people do not understand SSL configuration and when they have problems related to SSL they just do not know where to start. Even for the short list of people who do understand SSL configuration in WMQ, troubleshooting a problem can sometimes be a difficult task. In WMQ V7.x, many of the SSL related problems we see are dealing with Java™ or JMS configurations. With this in mind, we have created a technote which we think will help with the... [More]

After the installation of the WebSphere Message Broker product, it is always in good practice to test the installation to verify that there are not any problems. The best way I have found to do this, is by importing and running one of the many free samples that are provided with the Broker installation. Before doing this though, make sure you run the default Configuration Wizard via your Toolkit. This can be found by following these simple steps. Start the Default Configuration wizard from the WebSphere Message Broker Toolkit Welcome page,... [More]

Lately, we have been seeing some problem records (PMRs) from WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) V8 customers reporting ODBC connectivity problems when making SQL calls from a message flow ESQL compute node to an external database. Once the message flow containing the SQL calls is deployed to the Execution group and it receives its first message that causes the SQL call to be processed, then the broker would attempt to make its first connection with the database. This connection is facilitated by the ODBC driver that allows the broker to... [More]

Sometimes the simple things can seem difficult, but configuring JDBC with Message Broker is a pretty straight forward task. Typically, you are connecting to a database from a message flow application, which requires you to configure the message flow node that indicates the actual database call, a JDBC configurable service defined at the broker level, which allows the database call to be sent to the correct database and security, so that the DB knows who is making that call. There are several built-in nodes provided in WebSphere Message Broker... [More]

Like all platforms, specialized skills are just part of the territory when we talk about successfully migrating (upgrading) software. For those familiar with mainframes this has never been more true than in the z/OS environment where installation and migration tasks may entail extensive planning. When so many details have to be taken into account it can be easy to miss a simple step. Though relatively small, one misstep can mean missed targets or delays in rollouts to other environments until test systems are first up to snuff. So, while... [More]